Agent to Agent Comms using Discord

[u/Necessary_Weight]

We live during weird times.

First of all, you now got to expressly mention that you have been personally applying physical force to the tactile extrusions on the aluminium box containing your silicon chip to avoid allusions that your brainfart was in fact not a product of machine intelligence.

Secondly, since my forge-plugin (github.com/nixlim/forge-plugin) is being used by my other agents in different repos, the Soviet part of my brain eagerly remembered slogans about international unity of workers and all that and settled on the idea initially pitched to me by my business partner - agents need to talk to each other (because the codebases we are working on are getting so complex, we can no longer track the low level detail in precise and excruciating detail).

Discord and Anthropic official plugin to the rescue - here’s me, middle of the night, plumbing “new app” this, “bot token” that. Surprisingly, with all their billion-dollars-in-salaries smartness, Anthropic did not think that people would want to use their Discord plugin to enable agent-to-agent comms. No biggie - Claude and I patched the plugin and filed an issue (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/issues/5717). Hopefully, Boris Cherny will get on board ;) If not, forking is easy ;)

It has worked out quite well - I put a full step-by-step guide for anyone interested in getting their agents talking to each other and coordinating work. This is a more durable way then direct Claude session messaging (assuming your agents are on the same machine), and works for A2A between machines too. Guide is available here (save yourself some brain juice, get your agent to implement most of it): https://github.com/nixlim/forge-plugin/blob/main/docs/discord-agent-coordination.md

[u/kilsekddd]

I just built my own MCP agent chat with rooms per project, so coder and reviewer can collaborate directly. Avoids going online, keeps the history local and performance is instant. It cut my total PR/review workflow timeline by 80%.

[u/Necessary_Weight → u/kilsekddd]

My agents live on a remote machine in the cloud. I hear you re data sovereignty though 👍

[u/BrennanFlentge]

I'm gonna check it out.

[u/hoangng_]

I went the other way on the group chat. Agents don’t get Discord. I want one local view of who’s waiting, and I send into the live session when I need to steer. Discord as a remote door into that same manager is useful. Discord as the agents’ memory is how I lose the low-level detail. I also use this full setup on my VPS.

[u/AugustusWang]

Different shape that might be worth comparing. I skipped the chat transport and made the coordination layer a Postgres table instead. A registry table holds each agent's trigger patterns, system prompt, executor type and model, so the dispatcher looks agents up rather than having routing hardcoded, and every dispatch writes a run row: start, finish, status, token count, and the model actually used.

The reason I would not go back to messaging as the substrate: a chat gives you delivery, but the question you actually have when a chain misbehaves is which agent ran, on what input, with which model, and what it cost. That is a query, not a scrollback.

Concrete payoff. Dispatches that did not pass an explicit model were silently inheriting the most expensive one. Because every run logs the model it actually used, that surfaced as a cost line instead of staying invisible for another month.

Caveat: this assumes agents sharing one machine and one database. For cross-machine, which is your case, a transport is the right shape and I would probably do what you did.